General rules
for batch particle sizing.

Crop, Flatten,
Scale

1) Crop any size bars and
annotations out of the image. Otherwise they
might be blobbed.

2) Flatten the images and
rescale to byte. The rescaling is not necessary,
but makes better thumbnails, faster display, and sometimes smaller
files. If all of your image files have the
scale bars in the same place, one cropping
rectangle might do for the lot. Here are example process
folder commands for crop, flatten and rescale using

'Tools / Process
folder / ... '

pfldr txt file / Make

crop 0 0 1026 900

flatten 30

scale to byte normal

The flatten parameter should
get rid of the uneven background illumination,
but not be so small that particles are also flattened so
that they are bright edges holes in the middle. If they look like
donuts, the edges might not be completely continuous, and the
boundary will 'leak' into the interior of the particle.

Blob the images

4) Set these parameters in
the blob tool window.

min area

touch edge

'stats / set
stats'

If the images are uniform enough
to allow the use of one threshold setting for all of them, then set the thresholds
on a thresholdslider: .

5) Set the blob folder -
'+ / b / Set'. Blob files, which save the
outlines for the particles in each image, go here.

6a) Blob the files using 'Tools
/ Process folder / Files in folder / Blob'. If
the images are not uniform enough to allow use of one threshold setting
for all, then blob them individually.

6b) Threshold slider / ?Windows?
/ Front image.

Adjust threshold for
new image.

'Blob buttons
/ blob img!' - sets the image for blobbing.

'Blob buttons
/ blob / BLOB' - blobs the image. See outlines.

'Blob buttons
/ Select / Exclude ... ' get rid of unwanted blobs.

'Blob buttons
/ blob / save to file' saves the outline information.

The outline information is in
the blob folder in a file named <image
name>-nn.blob. If the image is blobbed more than once, nn
increases from 00 on up. These blob files
supply information for supsequent processing steps
such as 7.

You might want to check what
statistics will be saved in the next file using
'Blob buttons / stats / which stats selected?'